


pieces of you stuck on me

by waveridden



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21672766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveridden/pseuds/waveridden
Summary: Jon and Basira have both had… well, frankly awful experiences with missions that Elias has specifically assigned. But they can handle these things - or at least, he’d like to think they can. They’re literal secret agents, after all. It’s their job to handle these things.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, implied Daisy/Basira - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 84
Collections: 2019 AU December Challenge





	pieces of you stuck on me

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the AUcember series, a self-made challenge where I try to write a new AU one-shot every day. You can read all of the AUcember fics in the collection linked above. Title is from Wars by Of Monsters and Men.
> 
> This falls under the umbrella of what I call "two great tastes taste great together" AUs, aka I was sitting here thinking about how much I love the movie Mission: Impossible - Fallout and also TMA and then just sort of smushed everything together. There's a very real chance that this only makes sense if you've seen Fallout, but who knows?
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS: some violence (a very brief physical confrontation) that ends with death via gunshot. Nothing outside the realm of canon for either M:I or TMA.

“You look tired, Jon,” says Basira.

Jon is tired - tired enough that he can’t tell if that’s Basira’s way of showing that she’s worried or if she’s making fun of him for something. He settles for running a hand through his hair and saying “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been tasked to get you to your next mission in one piece.” She arches an eyebrow at him. “Heard the last one nearly ended with you in lots of pieces.”

“One piece, just with bullet holes.”

“Great work as always, Agent Sims.”

Jon rolls his eyes. He doesn’t enjoy the field work the same way that Basira does, or that Tim and Melanie tend to. He’s just… unlucky, in that he needs to go out on missions often. “What exactly am I doing today?”

Basira pushes a door open, and Jon follows her onto the tarmac. “New mission,” she says. “Straight from Bouchard himself.”

“Oh, straight from Bouchard,” Jon mutters. “Makes me feel so much better.”

She huffs a breath out through her nose. “You and me both.”

Jon and Basira have both had… well, frankly awful experiences with missions that Elias has specifically assigned. Basira came back from one and wouldn’t speak to anybody for a full six weeks; Jon still has limited range of motion in the hand that he burned. But they can handle these things - or at least, he’d like to think they can. They’re literal secret agents, after all. It’s their job to handle these things.

“Any idea what it is?” Jon asks, even though he’s sure Basira doesn’t. Elias is notoriously tight-lipped. He’s sure he’s going to get onto this plane and have a dossier there waiting for him, and he’ll be the only other person in the world to have all the information in it.

“Think it’s a follow-up to what happened in Prague,” Basira says breezily. “Don’t wince like that.”

“I’m not  _ wincing,” _ Jon mutters, even though he was wincing. Prague had been… horrible. Tim had nearly died. That’s not the best feeling for a team leader.

“Mmmmhm,” Basira says, and then abruptly stops moving.

Jon follows her gaze to the ramp of the plane. There are two women standing there: Daisy Tonner, and someone who Jon swears he’s met before.

“Basira,” Daisy says, cautiously.

Basira takes a tiny breath through her nose, and for an instant Jon feels horrible. Daisy went AWOL on a mission, got disavowed, and got immediately snapped up by some other agency. He’s not even sure which one. He knows that Basira misses her horribly. And judging by the look on her face, she wasn’t expecting to see Daisy again.

So instead, Jon shifts his attention to the other woman. He tilts his head, trying to size her up. It’s someone he hasn’t seen in years, but it’s someone he’s seen. It’s-

“Sasha,” he says suddenly. Of course it’s Sasha, why wouldn’t he remember Sasha? They’d been on investigative teams together, and then she’d left for another agency. But they’d always gotten along well.

Her face lights up all at once, beatific and friendly. “Jon! I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me, I’ve changed my hair.”

“Changed your hair,” Jon repeats. He remembers her hair being darker and longer, that much is true. “Of course. It’s good to see you.”

“Good to work with you,” she says. “It’s my understanding that this is an inter-agency mission.”

“Right,” Daisy says. Her voice is too gruff, and Jon can feel Basira shift minutely next to him. “Bouchard reached out to our people, something about nuclear power cores, I don’t really know the whole thing. He wanted us to provide support for this mission.”

Basira shoots Jon a look. “Nuclear power cores?”

Jon clears his throat, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “Things in Prague went… poorly.”

Daisy slowly raises her eyebrows. Sasha just keeps smiling, which is almost more unnerving.

“Very poorly,” Jon says, just to be clear.

Basira just sighs. “Fine,” she mutters. “You have ways to contact us if you need it?”

“Always.”

“Great.” She nods curtly at Daisy and spins on her heel, footsteps fading quickly as she heads back inside.

Jon glances at Daisy. “You alright?”

“Alive,” she says, and grimaces. “She, uh… how’s Basira?”

“Also alive,” Jon says. It feels like the kindest way to say that she’s been doing poorly.

Daisy exhales, a slow huffy breath. “What the hell happened in Prague?”

Jon opens his mouth to answer, then pauses. It’s a classified mission, perhaps more than most. “I’m not sure how much you can know.”

“How much does my agent need to know to do her job?”

“There was an incident,” he says, which is a colossal understatement. “I’m assuming you’ve heard of the Syndicate.”

Sasha leans in, eyes sparkling with fascination. “Orsinov’s Syndicate?”

“It’s barely hers,” Jon points out. “Nikola Orsinov has been in maximum security lockup for the past three years, ever since-”

“Since a previous mission,” Daisy says sharply.

“Right,” Jon says sheepishly. He’s always been awful at this confidentiality thing. “A mission that Agent Tonner here and I were involved in.”

“ _ Jon, _ ” Daisy says, exasperation laced through it. “What happened in Prague?”

He sucks in a breath. “Orsinov’s Syndicate has been after a couple of nuclear power cores. A team of agents and I were tasked with preventing them from buying those cores. The mission came down to either getting the cores ourselves and letting an agent die, or sacrificing the cores for the sake of the agent.”

“And you picked the agent,” Sasha finishes, as though it’s obvious. Maybe to her it is. She’d worked with Jon for a long time.

“I picked the agent,” he says softly. It feels like an underwhelming way to explain what had happened: the dim lights of the city, the gunshots, the shouting. Tim yelling that he’d never fucking speak to Jon again if Jon saved his life instead of the world. He’s held to that promise, too; he hasn’t said a word to Jon since then.

Daisy nods slowly. “Word of advice, Sims?”

“Sure.”

“Next time, don’t pick the agent.” She gestures at the plane. “Get on. James, keep me updated.”

“Yes ma’am,” Sasha says smartly, and starts up the ramp on the plane.

Daisy gives Jon one last meaningful look - what meaning he’s supposed to get out of it, he can’t say - and then turns to leave, the opposite direction from Basira.

Jon sighs, and turns to the ramp. Time for a new mission, he supposes.

#

They end up in Paris, at a nightclub. At a very  _ loud _ nightclub, naturally. It’s all part of the mission, but that certainly doesn’t mean Jon has to like it.

The dossiers have informed Jon that the nightclub will be housing a charity event, run by one Helen Richardson. She’s famously wealthy, famously charitable, and famously vicious in underworld circles. And the key to getting those nuclear cores is getting into that event.

It’s easy enough to get into the club, and to get changed into formalwear. It’s something of a relief to actually arrive in Paris; Sasha is eerily silent the whole trip. Jon doesn’t remember her as being talkative, exactly, but he remembers her talking and not just dodging questions. Maybe it’s a side effect of being more experienced. That seems… possible.

The dossier, unfortunately, did not tell them how to find Helen Richardson, or get into her charity event. That’s Elias for you, Jon supposes. All the information you could want, except for the information you actually need.

He lifts a hand to his ear, where he’s synced his comm with Sasha’s. “Anything?”

He can hear the tone of her voice replying, but he can’t make out any actual words. The music is head-splittingly loud, and even with Sasha speaking directly in his ear there’s no way to actually hear her. Instead, he looks around frantically, trying to spot anything or anyone that looks like Helen.

What he finds, instead, is Max Mustermann, staring across the club at him.

Slowly, he presses the button on his comm. “Sasha,” he says urgently. “Sasha, there are Syndicate agents here.”

Mustermann starts moving towards him. “ _ Shit, _ ” he mutters, and starts looking for a door. The closest one is the restroom, and he takes a moment to hope that nobody’s inside before he slips in. He looks around - nobody seems to be there, and if they’re hiding they’re about to get a nasty shock - and pulls out his gun. God, he hates shooting people, but he’s not seeing a way out of it this time.

The bathroom door swings open. Jon barely has time to take a breath before something goes flying directly at his head. He ducks, swearing as he goes, and then Mustermann is careening into him, knocking him to the ground.

Jon tries to wedge an arm up between their bodies, give him some leverage to knock Mustermann off, but the man is much, much stronger than Jon. He settles an arm across Jon’s throat and he wheezes, trying to angle his gun, trying to do something, anything-

“Orsinov says hello,” Mustermann says, and Jon scrabbles at his forearm as he presses down, driving into Jon’s windpipe, there has to be something he can do-

There’s a very loud bang. Something warm and wet splatters across Jon’s face, but the pressure at his throat goes away. Jon gasps for air, shoves the body off, scrabbles for his gun. He sucks in a breath and looks up. “Sasha-”

The words die in his throat. It’s not Sasha.

The last time Jon saw Martin Blackwood, it was when they had just captured Orsinov. She wasn’t even properly arrested yet, but she was still arrested. Martin had been forced undercover working with her, trying to find enough evidence to send to his handler to get him out of the Syndicate. The arrest was supposed to be what got him out of the game, got him somewhere safe. Clearly, it hadn’t worked.

Slowly, Martin lowers his gun. He looks breathless. He looks guarded. He looks… he’s looking at Jon. “Alright?”

“Alright,” Jon manages, even though he’s suddenly sure that nothing about this is alright. “Hi.”

Martin doesn’t smile. “You’re here for Helen, then?”

“I am. You?”

“You really shouldn’t tell other people your secret missions.”

“Martin-”

“I shouldn’t be here,” Martin says suddenly, like he’s remembering something. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Martin, breathe-”

“You shouldn’t be here either-”

“Martin!” Jon pushes himself to his feet, staggers for a step or two but comes to a stop in front of him. He has so many questions - what is Martin doing here, why would he kill Mustermann, shouldn’t he be safe, why isn’t he safe - but he forces himself to push all of them down. “Stop. We can figure this out.”

Martin stares at him in disbelief. “You think it’s that easy? To just… just figure it out?”

“Of course not.” He takes another step closer. “Not easy. But if you’re here, I’m making sure we both get out of here.”

“You say it like it’s simple.”

Jon huffs out a laugh, just this side of hysterical. “Nothing about this is simple, Martin. But I told you I’d get you out, and I meant it.”

Martin takes a deep breath. “Fine,” he says shortly. “It… fine. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Jon glances back at Mustermann. “Me too,” he murmurs. “Thank you for that.”

“You need to get cleaned up.” Jon turns back to Martin, who makes a face and mimes scrubbing at his cheek. “You’ve got a little… you know.”

Jon lifts a thumb to his cheek and wipes away some blood. He looks expectantly at Martin. “Better?”

Martin doesn’t laugh, not quite, but he says “Not at all, really.” And there’s something to his voice, a mirthful tilt in it, that makes Jon think that maybe they can get out of this in one piece.

**Author's Note:**

> You can come yell at me about Mission Impossible OR about JonMartin @waveridden on both Tumblr and Twitter!


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